| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: Laches?
LACHES: Certainly, Socrates.
SOCRATES: And all these are courageous, but some have courage in
pleasures, and some in pains: some in desires, and some in fears, and some
are cowards under the same conditions, as I should imagine.
LACHES: Very true.
SOCRATES: Now I was asking about courage and cowardice in general. And I
will begin with courage, and once more ask, What is that common quality,
which is the same in all these cases, and which is called courage? Do you
now understand what I mean?
LACHES: Not over well.
|
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: is impossible to foresee, he came in that evening two hours later than
usual from the club, where he went to read the papers and talk
politics with the residents in the neighborhood. His wife supposed him
to have come in, to be in bed and asleep. But the invasion of France
had been the subject of a very animated discussion; the game of
billiards had waxed vehement; he had lost forty francs, an enormous
sum at Vendome, where everybody is thrifty, and where social habits
are restrained within the bounds of a simplicity worthy of all praise,
and the foundation perhaps of a form of true happiness which no
Parisian would care for.
"For some time past Monsieur de Merret had been satisfied to ask
La Grande Breteche |
